Acceleration of tracer and light particles in compressible homogeneous isotropic turbulence

Abstract

The accelerations of tracer and light particles in compressible homogeneous isotropic turbulence (CHIT) is investigated by using data from direct numerical simulations (DNS) up to turbulent Mach number $M_t =1$. For tracer particles, the flatness factor of acceleration components, $F_a$, increases gradually for $M_t \in [0.3, 1]$. On the contrary, $F_a$ for light particles develops a maximum around $M_t \sim 0.6$. The PDF of longitudinal acceleration of tracers is increasingly skewed towards the negative value as $M_t$ increases. By contrast, for light particles, the skewness factor of longitudinal acceleration, $S_a$, firstly becomes more negative with the increase of $M_t$, and then goes back to $0$ when $M_t$ is larger than $0.6$. Similarly, differences among tracers and light particles appear also in the zero-crossing time of acceleration correlation. It is argued that all these phenomenons are intimately linked to the flow structures in compression regions, e.g. close to shocklets.